americanbanker.com Archives - 12 February 2013, Tuesday

PayPal's strict requirements for merchants that sell file-storage services have created an opportunity for competitors including BitPay, which processes payments in the digital currency Bitcoin. Last week, four vendors that market the cloud-storage services of Mega — the new venture f...

A group of angel investors including SecondMarket founder Barry Silbert has invested $510,000 in BitPay, a firm that processes payments for merchants in the digital currency Bitcoin. BitPay says it plans to use the new capital to move its headquarters to Atlanta from Orlando and to hi...

The budget deal reached at the beginning of this year extends an obscure but important tax break for U.S. banks that do business overseas, according to the FT . Under the "subpart F exception for active financing income" (rolls off the tongue, don't it?), income earned on certain tran...

Chris Larsen, who disrupted consumer finance in the 1990s and 2000s with E-Loan and Prosper, is seeking to shake up the industry again with Ripple, a peer-to-peer payment and lending system. Ripple looks to improve on Bitcoin, the decentralized virtual currency and payment system that...

The world's most popular web publishing platform has begun accepting Bitcoin, an international digital currency and payment system with no central issuing authority. WordPress, whose software is used by bloggers worldwide, said Thursday that customers can now use Bitcoin in lieu of cr...

There have been some new twists in the strange case of an alleged attempt to blackmail Mitt Romney for $1 million in bitcoins, raising additional legal questions about the digital currency. Two months ago I explained how an anonymous ransom letter threatening the release of then-presi...

Bitcoin and other virtual currencies can contribute positively to financial innovation but also subject users to various risks, according to a report published recently by the European Central Bank . According to the report, the growing use of the Internet, an increase in electronic c...

Bitcoin and other virtual currencies can contribute positively to financial innovation but also subject users to various risks, according to a report published recently by the European Central Bank . According to the report, the growing use of the Internet, an increase in electronic c...

Thanksgiving and the ensuing shopping sprees are a few weeks away, but a group of merchants who accept the digital currency Bitcoin are planning their own Black Friday before then. At least 25 retailers that accept the virtual tender are planning a sale slated for Nov. 9 that they've ...

Thanksgiving and the ensuing shopping sprees are a few weeks away, but a group of merchants who accept the digital currency Bitcoin are planning their own Black Friday before then. At least 25 retailers that accept the virtual tender are planning a sale slated for Nov. 9 that they've ...

It may be getting easier to buy with Bitcoin. BitPay, an Orlando-based company that helps online merchants accept the digitized currency as payment, said Tuesday more than 1,000 merchants have signed up for its service in the past year. Merchants who have signed up for BitPay include ...

It may be an elaborate hoax, but an apparent attempt to blackmail Mitt Romney shows the dark side of a disruptive financial technology and raises serious legal questions. In an anonymous letter addressed to PricewaterhouseCoopers, an individual or group of individuals claims to have o...

Returning bitcoins to the "from" address doesn't necessarily do what you think it does. If the sender used a hosted (shared) EWallet, the coins that you return will go to someone else other than the sender.You'll probably just want to pick a charity and send them there. If you wanted ...

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And Bitcoin is a risky place to store large sums of money. Fanatics will argue it's a better long-term investment than the U.S. dollar, because of the predictable and fixed supply – the algorithm that creates bitcoins is programmed to stop once there are 21 million of them – and who k...

The PayPal-Discover deal; Dunkin Donuts follows Starbucks into mobile payments; a Bitcoin MasterCard? Understanding Basel III: The Impact on Small Banks About 6,000 U.S. banks, including those as small as $500 million in assets, are required to implement the "standardized" approach in...

This week, the U.S. Postal Service is threatening to default if Congress does not give it more of our money, while the Office of Financial Research is considering requiring financial companies to turn over your trading and transactions data. When will these dinosaur ideas of centraliz...